The first airing of the third season premiere averaged 10.9 million viewers overall, up 50 percent over the season 2 premiere. Among young adults, it averaged 7.3 million viewers, up a comparable percentage. The three airings at 9 p.m., 10 p.m. and midnight combined for 15.2 million viewers.

AMC says these numbers make the premiere the most-watched telecast for any drama series in basic cable history.

"Thank you to the fans for making 'The Walking Dead' such a tremendous success," AMC president Charlie Collier said in a statement. "We are honored and humbled that television's largest adult audience resides on AMC. So many people on both sides of the camera worked tirelessly on this project, and I thank and congratulate each of them for their amazing contribution."

Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-'90s, first for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

You would think in today's world there would be a way of calculating # of tvs tuned in with all the digital cable boxes, instead of calculating it based solely on a bunch of nielsen households. Nielsen ratings, like any political poll, should be taken with a grain of salt... sadly, the lives of the production crews and the enjoyment of fans remain linked to this archaic means of tracking.